Raytracing

Some years ago, when I still had my good old Atari ST computer, I tried to build a 3D- model of my favorite Scale Model at this time, the German WWII CA Prinz Eugen
. It took quite a while to calculate all the data, but after several weeks, all the 3000+ points and nearly 2000 surfaces were completed.

The program that I used to display the 3D-model had several flaws, as it was much too slow. The used algorithm wasn't the best, the language was slow and the computer itself wasn't the fastest at all. To draw the ship as a wire frame object, it took up to two minutes, while using solid surfaces it could take up to one hour or more. Even then the result did not look too good, as the Atari only could display black and white, so different fill patterns had to be used for the different surfaces.

In 1995, I found the POVRAY Raytracer for MS-DOS and I got the idea to convert the Prinz Eugen
data in a way that they could be used in this Program.It got obvious that this could be done with the program MORAY, a scene designer for POVRAY. After the data was converted to a format usable by MORAY, it could be used to construct a scene for the raytracer program. Now, true color pictures in 640x400 resolution can be rendered in less than three minutes.

What made it even easier to build some larger scenes with MORAY is the fact that 3D-objects used or designed with the Flight Sim Toolkit
, a program to build your own flight simulators, could easily converted to a MORAY format, too. Therefore there was a huge library of available objects to use. All raytraced images on this pages were made in this way.